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Everything in Lucid
A bar, a dock that grows into a launcher, desktop widgets, a lock screen, and a settings app that runs the rest of the machine. Here is what each part does.
Six modules, each a pill that opens into a panel.
Every module can be turned off in Settings, and the bar comes in two shapes: island, floating rounded pills, or notch, flush to the screen edge with flares that blend into it.
- Workspaces. Live window previews per workspace. Scratchpads sit beside the dots as a chip marked with a glyph for what is stashed there: a terminal for a terminal, a note for an editor.
- Media. MPRIS controls, a seek bar, album art, and Shazam-style song identification through songrec.
- Tray. The system tray, with context menus that work.
- Clock. A calendar, the weather, and reminders that pop up when they're due.
- Notifications. Grouped by app, with inline reply for chat apps and progress bars for transfers. New ones stack under the bar; do-not-disturb holds them back.
- System. Volume, brightness, battery, disks and a Caffeine tile, full Wi-Fi and Bluetooth panels, and a switcher for audio output and input.
A dock that grows into the launcher.
A floating M3 toolbar with pinned apps, running-window indicators, drag to reorder, optional magnification and auto-hide. Open the launcher and the dock itself grows into it, instead of a second window appearing on top.
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Apps | Fuzzy search over your installed apps. Word starts and initials both hit, so vsc finds Visual Studio Code. |
| Commands | Shell commands and shell actions. |
| Theme | Switch between the bundled palettes and any you have imported. |
| Wallpaper | A carousel of your wallpaper folder. |
| Power | Lock, log out, suspend, reboot, shut down, hibernate. |
| Clipboard | What you copied earlier, images included. Pick one to put it back on the clipboard. |
Type = for a calculator: =2^3^2 is right-associative, as it should be.
Eleven kinds of card, thirty-three looks.
Open Settings → Widgets, click a tile, and it lands on the desktop. Drag it anywhere, pin it so it stops moving, and it comes back where you left it after a reboot.
- Snaps as you drag to the screen edges, the centre lines and the other widgets, with guides.
- Goes anywhere, including the strips the bar and dock reserve. A full-width visualiser tucked under the dock is the point.
- Sits below your windows by default and steps aside for fullscreen. Both are switches.
- Has its own menu. Right-click, or use the gear on hover, for its style, size, and options like 12 or 24 hours and °C or °F.
| Widget | Looks |
|---|---|
| Clock | Digital, stacked, analog, minimal (no card at all), and a world clock across three cities |
| Calendar | Full month, this week, today |
| System | Arc gauges, meters, a two-minute graph, or a bare row of numbers for CPU, memory, disk and temperature |
| Battery | Ring, cell, or full detail with time left and power draw |
| Media | Artwork card, compact row, or cover art with the controls over it |
| Visualiser | Bars, mirrored bands, or one filled wave, live off whatever is playing. Drag any edge to size it, right across the screen if you want |
| Weather | Now, a four-day forecast, or an icon and a number |
| Notes | A sticky square or a ruled sheet, saved as you type |
| To-do | A checklist, or just what is still outstanding |
| Palette | The Material roles the shell is built from right now. Click one to copy the hex |
| Phone | Card, compact row, or a remote for your paired phone: battery, signal, ring, ping, send a file or the clipboard |
Scratchpads that slide over what you're doing.
A key starts its workspace's app if it isn't running, and pulls it back if you moved it somewhere else. Opened from the launcher or the dock, the app lands in its workspace too. The scratchpad key also puts away whichever workspace is up, so one key always returns you to what you were doing.
- Super+Alt+S stashes the focused window in the scratchpad. Pressed inside a special workspace, it sends the window back.
- Settings → Workspaces picks each one's apps, turns any of them off, and sets how far the screen behind dims. Add an app offers everything installed.
- No Hyprland reload. The page writes
~/.config/hypr/lucid-specials.lua, which is read on every key press.
| Keys | Workspace | Opens |
|---|---|---|
| Super+Shift+S | Scratchpad | Nothing of its own. Somewhere to park windows |
| Super+Shift+M | Music | Spotify, Feishin, Supersonic, Cider, YouTube Music, TIDAL… |
| Super+Shift+D | Comms | Discord, Vesktop, Telegram, Signal, Element, Slack… |
| Super+Shift+R | To-do | Todoist, Planify, Errands, Endeavour, Obsidian… |
| Ctrl+Shift+Esc | System | btop in a terminal, Mission Center, Resources… |
A lock screen that asks PAM, not sudo.
A real session lock, laid out the way Material You lays out a lock screen: an oversized two-line clock in the wallpaper's own colour, the weather, battery, network and Bluetooth at a glance, what is playing, and your notifications.
- Two faces, one screen. Start typing and it focuses: the wallpaper blurs further and everything but the sign-in card steps back and stops taking clicks.
- Refusals that say something. “Incorrect password, 2 tries left” counts down against faillock's real limit, and a lockout shows how long is left.
- Small things that matter. A Caps Lock badge, the keyboard layout, a caret you can steer with the arrow keys, and power actions that ask before they log you out.
- Nothing reaches past it. Notifications on the lock can't launch anything or reply, and other screens show only the clock.
- A login screen to match. The lock ported to SDDM, painted from the running shell's colours. The installer copies it in but never switches to it. That choice stays yours.
PAM, like a display manager
It checks against /etc/pam.d/login, so any account can unlock and PAM's own words are what you read when something goes wrong.
Lucid is the polkit agent
Every administrator prompt on the machine comes up in the shell's own dialog. It names the action and shows whose password it wants.
Users and accounts
Names, account types, shells, passwords, pictures and groups for every account, all through AccountsService, so nothing runs as root.
Seventeen pages, no config files.
A collapsible rail, grouped-list cards, an app bar that collapses as you scroll, and a reset arrow on anything you have moved off its default. The Users and Accounts page opens from the card at the top of the rail.
| Group | Pages |
|---|---|
| Appearance | General, Glass, Theme, Environment |
| Desktop | Bar, Dock, Widgets, Workspaces |
| Devices | Displays, Sound, Network, Bluetooth, Phone |
| System | Notifications, Idle, Date & Time, About |
The small things you reach for all day.
Screenshots
Region select, full screen, and screen recording with optional microphone and system audio.
Text copier
Drag a box over anything on screen and the words inside land on your clipboard. Emoji come across too, matched against your emoji fonts.
Colour picker
Click a pixel and get it as HEX, RGB or HSL, all valid CSS, with the colour itself shown in the toast.
Clipboard history
The launcher's Clipboard mode keeps what you copy, images included, for as long as the shell runs.
On-screen keyboard
Never takes the focus off what you're typing into. Modifiers latch on one press and lock on two.
Emoji picker
Emoji, kaomoji and GIFs from Giphy or Tenor, with recents, favourites and skin tones. Pastes into the focused window.
Toasts
A compact pill under the bar that any script can raise: qs ipc call -- toast show game "Game Mode On".
On-screen displays
Volume, brightness and microphone as a badge and a level. Caps Lock shows ABC against abc, not on and off.
Settings that run the rest of your computer.
Lucid's settings go past the shell. Each of these pages drives the real system service behind it, so it agrees with every other tool you use.
Network
Wi-Fi, wired, VPN and WireGuard, a hotspot, and an IP editor for DHCP or a hand-set address, all through NetworkManager.
Sound
Every output and input, each app's own volume and device, and playback that moves across when you switch outputs. Reads PipeWire directly.
Bluetooth
Pair, connect, rename, block and see battery, plus high-quality versus headset mode for headphones.
Phone
A real KDE Connect client: send files, read and answer notifications, a media remote, and a touchpad and keyboard for the phone.
Idle and sleep
Dim, lock, screen off and suspend as sliders. Lucid writes the hypridle config and restarts it for you.
Environment
Cursor, icons, GTK, Qt and fonts, written everywhere they need to go at once, down to a cursor without its shadow.
Displays
Resolution, refresh rate, scale and arrangement by dragging. The shell sits on whichever display you pick.
Glass
One slider for how far the desktop shows through the shell, kitty and your app windows, with per-app frosting.
Notifications
Quiet hours, a rule for fullscreen windows, a sound, per-app muting, and how many popups stack at once.
Date and time
One forecast from Open-Meteo shared by the bar, the lock and the widget. The time zone is the machine's, set through a polkit prompt.
Updates
Once a day Lucid asks GitHub for the newest release and tells you once, in a notification. Turn it off in About.
Account pictures
Old pictures stay on a shelf in the picker, newest first, so anything you have worn is a click away.